Enjoy The Violence: Is appreciation for extreme music the result of cognitive control over the threat response system?

Abstract

Traditional neurobiological theories of musical emotions explain well why extreme music such as punk, hardcore or metal, whose vocal and instrumental characteristics share much similarity with acoustic threat signals, should evoke unpleasant feelings for a large proportion of listeners. Why it doesn't for metal music fans, however, remains a theoretical challenge: metal fans may differ from non-fans in how they process acoustic threat signals at the subcortical level, showing deactivated or reconditioned responses that differ from controls. Alternatively, it is also possible that appreciation for metal depends on the inhibition by cortical circuits of a normal low-order response to auditory threat. In a series of three experiments, we show here that, at a sensory level, metal fans actually react equally negatively, equally fast and even more accurately to cues of auditory threat in vocal and instrumental contexts than non-fans. Conversely, cognitive load somewhat appears to reduce fans' appreciation of metal to the level reported by non-fans. Taken together, these results are not compatible with the idea that extreme music lovers do so because of a different low-level response to threat, but rather, highlight a critical contribution of higher-order cognition to the aesthetic experience. These results are discussed in the light of recent higher-order theories of emotional consciousness, which we argue should be generalized to the emotional experience of music across musical genres.

ANGUS: Real-time manipulation of vocal roughness for emotional speech transformations

“…It is in fact likely that such context effects affect appraisals of roughness for all types of sounds [48], allowing e.g. a rough shout to be perceived as a positive bout of laughter [14], or rough music as pleasingly empowering [7]. Tools like ANGUS, which allow to control cues of vocal arousal at the stimulus level, contribute to make possible more research on how these cues are cognitively appraised in ecological situations [38].…”

“…There is a vast biological literature suggesting that roughness is a signal of threat and negative salience throughout the human and animal communicative repertoire [32][33][34]. In addition, these signals, shaped by biological evolution, have also been selected for in cultural artefacts, such as musical sounds and sound alarms, which aim at the same effect [7,35]. In [36], musical sequences transformed with distortion were evaluated as more negative and aroused than non-transformed sequences; in [5], so were musical instrument samples and alarm sounds when manipulated with 40-60Hz temporal modulations.…”

“…Beyond language, vocal arousal and non-linearities are also prominently featured in popular music, e.g. in the growling vocal style of jazz or popular music singers such as Louis Armstrong, Tom Waits or Kurt Cobain [6] and, perhaps most remarkably, in extreme music such as metal [7].…”

The Psychology of Metal Music, Culture, and Dis/Ability

“…A lot of heavy metal music is perceived as violent and aggressive, and is consistent with auditory threat signals (Ollivier et al 2019), so there has been a continual association between heavy metal and immoral or violent behavior, but that connection is largely unfounded. Rather, it has been found that heavy metal, including with violent themes, consistently has positive emotional, cognitive, and social consequences for fans (Messick 2020;Olsen et al 2020;Sharman and Dingle 2015;Leisuk 2010;McFerran et al 2015).…”

Musical pleasure and musical emotions

“…With a cumulated 4,000 citations since 2001 (bibliometric data based on a search using Google Scholar on January 16, 2019), these four studies (2-5) have had a remarkable influence on the neuroscience literature, and on the music neuroscience community in particular, for which the 2001 study can be considered one of the founding acts: Of these citations, 1,770 (44%) include the words "music" or "musical" in their titles. While the question of the musical expression of emotion has a long history of investigation, including in PNAS (6), and the 1990s psychophysiological strand of research had already established that musical pleasure could activate the autonomic nervous system (7), the authors' demonstration of the implication of the reward system in musical emotions was taken as inaugural proof that these were veridical emotions whose study has full legitimacy to inform the neurobiology of our everyday cognitive, social, and affective 1, linking the auditory and orbitofrontal cortices to the NAcc, and (B) one of the many possible mechanisms of musical emotion induction discussed in the literature, hypothetically linking the auditory thalami, the amygdala, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex engaged, for example, when experiencing heavy metal (14). As of yet, it is unclear how mechanisms such as these relate to one another.…”